Just to chip in, I would imagine a substantial amount of that $3,000 goes towards hosting the website, maintaining it, and so on, and probably represents a significant amount of the costs.

Web hosting costs only about $100/year for unlimited storage and bandwidth at Winhost, which is what I use. Site maintenance is relatively straightforward for a leisure site like his (whereas shopping sites and the likes are much more high maintenance and costly). I suspect disc cost is Gary's biggest cost, like he alluded to. Whatever the cost, if it disrupts his everyday necessities like heating (and who knows what else), then he gotta take care of the necessities first, and review and buy fewer discs.

Just checked his page and it says that he has 639 Patreons! If he's getting $3 from everyone, he's pulling in nearly $2k a month. I do feel for the guy and enjoy the website (and am a Patreon!) but it seems like that should be more than enough to cover the expense of the discs. If he spends $40 per disc, that covers 47!